Displaying an overlap of two or more graphics planes on a display device generally requires combining the two or more graphics planes before outputting display data to a television, computer screen, or other display device. A prior art technique involves combining the graphics by simply merging entire portions of two or more graphics planes.
In accordance with the above-described technique, a discrete component is used to hardware-overlay the entire portion one graphics plane with the entire portion of another graphics planes to produce a combined frame. The discrete component is typically used because too many computations are required for a general-purpose processor to software-overlay the entire portion of each graphics plane. The combined frame may then be displayed on a display device.
Combining two or more graphics planes is expensive due to the need for the above-described discrete component. The disclosure that follows solves this and other problems.